On Monday, the Archive Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge made
available to the public for the very first time the results of one of the
biggest intelligence leaks in history. The documents, collected by Vasili
Mitrokhin, a KGB defector, were handed over to the UK authorities in 1992
and include details on the Soviet agency’s infiltration efforts
regarding
the 1968 Czechoslovak Prague Spring. In total, 19 boxes of Mitrokhin’s
notes will be made available, and could help Czech historians shed more
light on a painful chapter in the country’s history. I spoke with Vilém
Prečan of the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre, and asked him for his
take on the significance of this trove of information:

Mitrokhin Archive at the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge, photo: CTK
“Firstly, I would say that this is big news. If I could, I would travel
tomorrow to Cambridge. Perhaps we will end up knowing more details about
the KGB network in Czechoslovakia in 1968; about the agents and how deep
their network was in Czech and Slovak societies.”

What new information can we learn? What do we know and what don’t
we
know right now with regards to the KGB infiltration of the Prague
Spring?

“We can learn what connections they had and what their intentions were.
Until now, we have known the details as presented via communist party
records. This was thanks to a major project initiated by Professor Stefan
Karner from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Graz, Austria. This was in
2008 and was a joint project between Russian and Czech institutions and
historians. But we had nothing about the KGB.”

So even during the Boris Yeltsin era - where there was a release of
KGB-related information, before the doors were again shut during the Putin
era - nothing came out?

“You see, we simply did not have enough dollars to buy these records.
There were some historians out there, or maybe the CIA, that were rich
enough to buy up everything. Because during that time, even the most
secret
records were available for hard currency.”

How big are the gaps in the history of the Prague Spring? It’s been
studied now for almost fifty years. What do we still not know?

“I think that the international context has been studied and researched
only with regards to Moscow. But not the Western context. I think that we
still need to learn about the expectations and estimations in London, in
France, in Bonn and in the United States. It seems like Czech
historiography stopped researching this particular great theme in our
contemporary history.”

Vasili Mitrokhin's handwritten copy of the KGB First Chief Directorate Lexicon, photo: CTKWhy did it stop?

“Maybe there aren’t enough means and enough historians. Maybe now the
interest is more geared towards the democratic revolutions and the
democratic transitions of the 1990s as opposed to the events of 1968.”